Team at TurnCommerce unveils new domain name registrar with tools for domainers.
What would happen if a large domain name investor created a domain registrar from the bottom up?
The result would look like NameBright.com.
NameBright.com is a new domain name registrar created by the team at TurnCommerce, one of the largest domain portfolio holders with over 1 million domain names. The registrar has the potential to attract some of the top domain investors that require tools such as account delegation and portfolio management, as well as smaller domain investors looking for a simple user interface and low pricing.
I’ve been test driving the registrar over the past couple weeks to get a handle on its key features and to see how it could win over domainers.
Pricing
Price is, no doubt, a top concern among domainers.
Standard pricing at NameBright for .com domains is $8.53, which the registrar considers to be “at cost” when you take into account credit card processing fees. If you prepay by check, you can register .com domains for only $8.03 and .net for $6.55, which is NameBright’s actual cost paid to Verisign and ICANN. Given the overhead NameBright carries (and that anyone who runs a registrar carries), this is a really good deal.
The company hopes to make money through the sale of additional products.
Whois privacy is free for the first year and $2.95 after that. You can also pay $9.95 per year to upgrade your domain and get additional features.
Security
Respondents to the Domain Name Wire survey last year said that security was their top concern when selecting a domain name registrar.
NameBright offers optional two-factor authentication, a must for any domain name registrar. When you log in to the site, you’ll be asked to submit an additional one time code that is sent via text message to your phone. The two-factor implementation is very similar to that of GoDaddy.
The registrar also tracks every change made to a domain name. This is something fairly unique. For example, here’s my change log for a test domain I registered, TestingItout12.com:
The registrar offers additional security controls when it comes to user delegation…
User delegation
Most domainers manage their own domain name portfolios. But when you get up to the 10,000, 100,000, or more mark, many domainers have a team that helps manage the portfolio.
NameBright really shines in this area, and its user controls are something that will set it apart.
Domainers can create Linked Accounts with other users. These linked users have very granular controls on what they can do. For example, you can allow them to initiate inbound transfers but not outbound transfers. You can allow them to renew domains, change nameservers, and change forwarding — or disallow any of these things.
Upgraded domains
I mentioned earlier that one way NameBright hopes to make money is by selling add-on features. One service is called Upgraded Domain. For $9.95 per year, an Upgraded Domain gets unlimited domain history and whois counts (vs. 30 days on a regular domain), DNS firewall, a brand protection monitor, and a few other goodies. It also includes custom whois text so you can include your own message in whois, like this:
It seems like a good option for some types of customers, although the price is prohibitive for large portfolio holders.
Other Domainer Features
Here are some other domainer-friendly features NameBright offers:
– “Portfolios” for easier management of domains
– Fast domain changes, such as changing forwarding on domains for an entire portfolio at once
– Whois counters to see how many times people search your domains in whois
– Email management for domain name portfolios and category-based email accounts
There are several other unique features explained here.
Can NameBright compete?
Domain name registration is a low margin business dominated by a handful of incumbent registrars. Is there room for NameBright to compete?
I remember speaking to a registrar a few years ago that had tried to attract the domainer audience and found it challenging. They told me that domain investors were a bit more loyal to registrars than they thought. And once you get a domainer on board, they also prove to be quite demanding.
Yet that registrar wasn’t actually built by a domain investor, and they were competing mostly on price. I agree that if you’re just trying to undercut the competition by a few dimes you’ll have a hard time attracting business.
That NameBright was built from the ground up over five years by a large portfolio holder means it has a lot of the features that domainers will appreciate. Some of them are rather innovative and should appeal to a segment of the market.
Can they speak about the other 50 registrars they own and use for drop catching? What role will they play if any in their future plans? Will they be rolling a back ordering service (which seems to make sense?) –
Well I was the first One and Owner of Branded name I WILL not mention.Put my life into.Now you can buy it on a big price-N##me right.com .-Thing is, I will always be the true Owner.RS
Will their two-factor authentication be available to countries other than US and Canada?
I’m in Australia and the two-factor authentication works fine. Out of the four domain registrars I use NameBright is the best all round, for my dinky little portfolios anyway.
If it is a registrar form domainers for domainers, why they do not offer aftermarket listings?
They said they’ll be in AfternicDLS soon. It’s there, but they need to do a little more integration I think.
From downforeveryoneorjustme:
“It’s not just you! http://namebright.com looks down from here.”
Good luck to the people at NameBright. Not easy, of course, but…they’re willing to at least try.
Enom, Moniker, Netsol and Godaddy don’t make their big profit by renewing domains for domain owners. They make the big dollars by selling non-renewed domains through the auction process.
Web didn’t pay that huge sum for Netsol just to get more hosting customers.
TC probably realized they reached a plateau. And, the next step to profitability is selling older domains not renewed by domain owners. TC figures spending $ 8.50 for quality domains is far cheaper than paying wholesale for them. Or, hoping they catch the expiring domains through the drop process.
Quark – as Andrew said we are integrated with DLS, just have more testing to do on that end before we can launch it to everyone.
Jeff – we found a small configuration issue on one of the servers and have fixed that.
Dave – thanks. Going to be a fun road helping domainers along the path we have traveled!
Fabulous was pretty much built for domainers. I wouldn’t go after that market myself. . . very high maintenance customers (self included). Good luck though Andrew.
Adam – you are correct domainers can be high maintenance. I know this because I am a domainer myself. I am probably higher maintenance than most domainers you know. And that is exactly why NameBright.com was built…. So that we could fix the issues that most registrars have today. To make managing domains in bulk easier. And make it more cost effective… Yes, domainers are our target market, because they are the grass roots of the domain name industry. If you have any suggestions on how we can improve let me know!
Thank you for your wishes for success.
Get a real job
Andrew – Can you answer my question? Will you be using your other 50 registrars to help domainers backorder domains? If so, will we be competing with you since you currently use them to register 1000 domains daily from the drop for your own portfolio?
How much are renewals?
Ron – Registrations, Transfers, Renewals are the same price for almost all extensions – including .com and .net. The $8.53 / $8.03 pricing you see for .com is not just an introductory price.
You don’t have a ‘one page website’ available?
To be honest, nothing impressed me to switch.
Anyhow, Good luck to you.
Andrew R – why are you not answering my question?
—————
Can you answer my question? Will you be using your other 50 registrars to help domainers backorder domains? If so, will we be competing with you since you currently use them to register 1000 domains daily from the drop for your own portfolio?
James – I apologize for that. We are working on something similar to what you are talking about. I don’t want to get into the details right now, but your concerns will be satisfied. We do not intend to compete with our customers. That is all I can say at this point.
Do you plan to offer the possibility to pay by Paypal?
We had not discussed Paypal until now, but we are all about hearing ideas so we can build exactly what our customers want! We will look into this as I could see it being feature many people would like. Thanks for the suggestion.
Will you accept Bitcoin and cut off your credit card fees?
John – I’m not sure if Bitcoin has the reach / market to make integration worth our while… Doe it? We will have to look into it and investigate as I only know a little about it. I presume you use bitcoins for your domain registrations? Care to give more details / reasoning for registering domains using bitcoins? Thanks.
Andrew – I use it a lot for various uses, but not yet to pay for my registrations because my Registrar of choice still doesn’t take it (but they will likely embrace in a near future). Please note you don’t have to touch or understand Bitcoin in order to accept it, just go to BitPay.com and select a billing plan – you’ll pay a FIXED monthly fee as low as $30 and all transactions will have ZERO fee. BitPay will convert BTC to USD and you’ll receive the exact dollar amount in your bank account at the end of the day, thus you take zero volatility risk.
BTW Baidu just announced today they’ll begin accepting BTC. It’s becoming huge in China.
A pair of months ago the bitcoin lost half of his value overnight, this is the risk to support bitcoin.
There are plenty of payment processors that will take the volatility out of the equation and deliver USD to you. You don’t need to stay with Bitcoin. Please consider spending 5 minutes to educate yourself.
Thanks for your positive mood and for accept improvement suggestions!
Yes support Paypal is really a requirement, (most domainers get paid through Paypal), and decrease a little the whois privacy cost another critical point.
Before decide to move domains I think people compare what they have and check if they will not pay more for the same service, they only look at additional features if at least they do not lost money.
Also if you want a parameter I started hand registering related names back in 2011 and have made a hefty amount (six figures) this year selling Bitcoin names to start-ups. I don’t understand why most domainers haven’t embraced it yet.
Re: User delegation
Andrew… Actually you are a little incorrect on this. You hint at user delegation being more important for bigger domainers.
But look at this. Joe Smith owns his company. And it is located at antiques.com. (made up name for the example) And he hires a web developer… Should he say “this is my username and password?” NO!!! He should say “great I have linked you to my account.” And he does not give the permissions to change ownership of the domain. To transfer the domain. To get the authorization code for the domain. Or to unlock the domain.
Linked accounts are so useful is so many situations. And I think they can be more useful to the end consumer than to the domainer. The question is how do we train the end user of this? Domainers are a smaller crowd and easier to reach. But to mom and pop businesses, linked accounts are critical.
Just wanted to correct something in your post that I think might be painting a different picture.
Good point
cybertonic and others.. thank you for the suggestions. Pre-funding accounts via paypal will be launched next week. The following week we hope to have Paypal.com payments integrated with the shopping cart.
Hi, do you know the auction site namebright.com uses? I am hoping to get a domain a fellow purchased from them that is expiring pretty soon. Thank you
I’ve tried to by new domains with up to 7 different credit cards but the following message keep showing up:
Invalid Payment Information – Please verify your credit or debit card information.
http://www.NameBright.com doesn’t reply my messages.
Please help!!!
alleralejandro@gmail.com
They suspend my current domains because of the domain contact verification error and our users cannot reach to our web sites for days. you cannot verify domain contact information if you don’t live in US because they can’t send SMS to your phone if you live outside of US so they suspend to your domain. They work really unprofessional and their technical capacity and support very poor
I’m a little late to the conversation, but I’m a one-man operation trying to get my Fair Trade site, windnwax.tv, off the ground. Fred at namebright has been a blessing in that he is both patient and attentive to my needs–not as a bigshot domain investor–but as an entrptreneur who has no clue. Thanks namebright!
Namebright sucks
Today I was about to register a couple of domains three, but at the last minute decided to check their reputation… glad I did … the comments about pirating their customers’ domains at the slightest opportunity was enough to send me back to my more expensive registrar.
Having a registrar as a component of a Domain Reselling business may seem like a good idea but I’d actually say it’s a conflict of interest.
Avoid.
Hmmm…so which registrar did you go with? Bet you ten bucks they take expired domains and sell them off…
I cant understand, can i sale my domain here beside buying like sedo or godaddy?
Bought 2 domains, Name Bright respond fast though still unable to link up to my host.
Namebright does not offer a free email forward. Its a scam. there is no free email forward. It is a spam filter with 100 percent of the emails forwarded going into a namebright spam filter to be deleted after 7 days. Extremely inconvenient. We all have our own spam filters that can be used on our email accounts and dont need a spam filter for all of our emails so that nothing is delivered into our email boxes. If you dont want to offer a service dont claim that you do.
NamXXXight.com is a domain shark nothing more, nothing less! They take expired domains and sell them off at fantasy prices. I missed to renew my domain lease and 12 weeks later it is with NamXXXright.com – available for “Only $2,695”.
Racing Pal, you are correct, they did the same thing to me when I had covid. It probably was about 2 weeks and they want almost 4K for mine. They can go to hell. I wouldn’t buy anything from those scum.